By the light of the moon, which had now risen, I was able to recognize the oil-skin caps usually worn by taxi-drivers. Inside the cabs I caught a glimpse of soldiers sleeping, their heads thrown back.
"Wounded?" asked somebody.
"No," came the answer from a passing car. "It's the 7th Division from Paris. They're off to the front!"
Tuesday, September 8
"Attention!"
It was still pitch-dark. Cinders continued to smoulder on the hearths. The guns were still roaring, and the vivid jets of fire startled us like flashes of lightning. A little way off, to the east, a farm or hayrick was burning. The weather was sultry and a persistent smell of putrefying flesh permeated the air.
The battery started; we were off to the firing-line.
At daybreak we reached Dammartin, where, on the doors and closed shutters, notices and billeting directions were chalked up in German. On the front door of one house I saw two words scrawled in pointed, Gothic handwriting: "Gute Leute" (Good people). I wondered who it was that lived there....
We continued on our way. The dull boom of the guns seemed to come from the bowels of the earth, and continued uninterruptedly.
By the side of the road a grave had been dug and marked by a white deal cross bearing a name painted in tar and capped by a Chasseur's shako with a brass chain. The dead man had evidently not been buried soon enough, and a sickening smell rose up from the freshly turned soil, which had cracked under the hot sun.